


Fahrenheit

by 8611



Category: Supernatural, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hunters, Alternate Universe - Supernatural (TV) Fusion, Blood, Gore, M/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-01
Updated: 2014-02-01
Packaged: 2018-01-10 20:07:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1163945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8611/pseuds/8611
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“She all good?” Stiles asks when Scott hangs up.</p><p>“Totally fine,” Scott says. “She and Chris and Allison are tracking some vamps.”</p><p>“Sounds like fun,” Stiles says, and tosses the keys to Scott. </p><p>He texts John when they’re on the road -- <i>Idaho, be back inside a week</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fahrenheit

**Author's Note:**

> Teen Wolf characters + Supernatural canon/mythos.

There is dirt across Scott’s forehead where he’d dragged his arm across his skin, replacing sweat with grave dirt, and Stiles wants to reach out and smudge it away. 

“This dirt sucks,” Stiles says instead. It’s heavy, hard stuff. Clay. Solid midwestern earth that you can build cities on and not have to worry about them shifting. It’s rained recently enough to make the dirt even heavier and messier. 

“Seriously,” Scott grunts, putting his full weight behind his shovel. It scrapes against wood, Stiles’ favorite sound when they’re six feet under after a long day. 

“Open her up,” Stiles says, tossing Scott a crowbar. 

The twisted husk of a body inside is bent at an unnatural angle and partially mummified. It’s better than some, though. Stiles has dealt with enough lead coffin corpse-soup to last him several lifetimes. 

“Let’s do this,” Scott says, and they pull themselves back up onto the grass, hands gritty against the green blades. 

Salt, kerosene, match, ignition. It’s old habit by now. 

\---

They roll up to the Sheriff’s place just past noon, when the sun is at its highest point in the summer sky. Stiles squints against the light coming off of the car and stalks to the porch, dropping his duffle by the door. Scott follows suit, and they leave clay-cracked boots on the mat in a haphazard pile. 

They shed clothes as they go, know they’ll get a disapproving stare from John when he gets home, but neither of them care right now. Stiles can smell the earth and smoke on them, knows the car will smell like it for weeks. It’s a cycle - smoke, sulphur, blood, decay - and the Jeep is never quite the same afterwards, even if they drive it without the top or doors for a month or two. 

The heavy tiredness hanging over them means all they do is clamber into the shower together long enough to scrub away everything that isn’t their skin. They watch it all swirl down the drain, and then collapse into the too-small bed in the room Stiles grew up in. 

\---

Stiles wakes up when the door bangs open downstairs, voices filtering up the stairs. He’s got an arm around Scott, the other hand automatically on the handle of the knife under his pillow. Scott’s a heavy sleeper, something that not even the life he was raised in could breed out of him, and he just noses against Stiles’ shoulder, limbs thrown every which way. 

Stiles eases out of bed, stopping only long enough to pull on a pair of jeans. He’s quiet as he moves, even though he doesn’t need to be, he can hear that it’s just dad downstairs. It’s just a habit.

Deputy Parrish is with him in the kitchen. They’re sitting at the table, a couple of beers open and a case file spilled across the rough wooden table top. 

“You guys didn’t check in with Melissa,” John says, looking up as Stiles pulls the fridge open by the bottom edge with his toes. 

“Sorry,” Stiles says. They had honestly just forgotten -- it had been a long 24 hours without sleep. “Job’s done.”

“Good,” John says. “Now how about picking up the clothing trail?”

When Stiles turns around with a beer John is looking at him pointedly, eyebrows raised. 

“God, dad,” Stiles whines theatrically, before cracking a grin. “Yeah, sorry, I’ll go deal with it.” 

When Stiles moves to set the bottle down he doesn’t miss the way Parrish’s eyes snag on him. As far as Stiles can remember, Parrish has never seen him shirtless before, and Stiles can feel it as his eyes track each little thing -- all of his scars: most supernatural, some surgical, and one just a good old fashioned human with a gun -- before coming to rest on the cut of Stiles’ hips. He’s got a pair of tattoos, one over each hip, and with his jeans riding low they’re both mostly visible. Parrish probably sees them as weird goth kid type shit - most people do. 

John seems to sense that Parrish is going to ask questions that he doesn’t want the answers to, can’t have the answers to. 

“Clothes,” John says, pointing into the hallway with his pen. Stiles goes, because he doesn’t want Parrish asking questions either. 

\---

They manage five whole days at the Sheriff's. That’s straight up vacation territory for them, and they waste the days playing baseball in the field behind the house and watching bad monster movies and fucking when the house is empty, just theirs. 

They’re lying out in the sun on the porch roof, cleaning and oiling guns, when Scott’s phone buzzes with a text from Melissa. 

_42° 34.398', -114° 27.909' probably a wraith. stay safe and CHECK IN THIS TIME. x mom._

“Man, and I was hoping we could go for a whole week,” Stiles sighs. “Maybe break our record from that summer three years ago.”

‘That summer’ had been weirdly quiet. They’d bounced between John’s place and the Argent’s bar, even seen Melissa for a full two weeks when she’d admitted that there was nothing on the road. 

“Nothing’s going to break that record,” Scott says. He pushes himself up onto his knees, looking out into the ring of trees around the house. He can just see the farm next door, the fields hazy in the low afternoon sunlight. 

They pack up and slide down the drain pipe, making it rattle against the siding. Stiles checks the footlocker in the back of the Jeep to make sure they’re good to go, and Scott wanders across the lawn, talking to Melissa on the phone, his voice quiet. 

“She all good?” Stiles asks when Scott hangs up.

“Totally fine,” Scott says. “She and Chris and Allison are tracking some vamps.”

“Sounds like fun,” Stiles says, and tosses the keys to Scott. 

He texts John when they’re on the road -- _Idaho, be back inside a week_. 

\---

They don’t make it back inside a week, head into Colorado instead. The Jeep whines and screams in protest when they work their way into the mountains on the narrow 2-lane highway, but Stiles just pats the dash and offers Roscoe some soothing words. 

The wraith hadn’t put up too much of a fight, somewhat shocked when she realized that the two kids with the baby-blue Jeep were hunters. Her face had been soft, open surprise when Scott had sunk a silver knife to the hilt in her chest. 

That’s generally people’s default reaction to Scott and his curls and Stiles and his lanky limbs. No one expects the two college-age nobodies at the back of the diner to be packing enough heat and strength to take out whole packs of things that go bump in the night. 

A couple of demons have moved in to a ski resort town, from what they can figure from hunter chatter. They’re closest, so they drop down across state lines, into the mountains. The whole thing is cracking Stiles up, he’s been making jokes about yuppie demons for the last 25 miles. 

It’s July, and the weather is gorgeous, wide blue skies and tall perfect pines. They stroll through the village and stare at the overpriced clothing and sporting goods in the store windows. 

“I bet you this place is like North Pole picture perfect during the winter,” Stiles says. 

“Totally something out of a story book,” Scott agrees. 

\---

They take one of the only running lifts up to mid-mountain, and watch their shadows as they race across the rocky forest below them, occasionally crossing the clean expanse of one of the runs sliced into the pines. 

When they get off, Stiles perches himself on top of a boulder and stares out at the expanse of the valley cut through the mountains. It’s a deep wound, as old as their world. 

“We should bike down,” Stiles says. They’d seen mountain bikers on their way up.

“No way, dude,” Scott says, snorting out a laugh. “We’d kill ourselves.” 

“But think of the hilarious way we’d go down in the hunter annals. ‘Those two fuckmunches who died at a ski resort.’”

“It’s not even ski season,” Scott says, crosses his arms. Stiles grins at him, all cat-caught-canary. 

“Nah, we’ll die like normal,” Stiles says, hopping down and heading for the restaurant building tacked to the side of the mountain, sunk into the terrain like a natural growth. “Before 30, after getting ripped apart by a wendigo or something.” 

“Pretty sure that’s not normal,” Scott says, and Stiles just shrugs. 

\---

They don’t mean to actually find the demons in the building. 

There are two of them, a person held up between them as they drain the guy’s blood into a goblet, the red gushing from his neck and seeping into his white shirt. 

“Fuck,” Stiles says succinctly, and Scott has to agree. Demons are the worst, twisted and sharp and pretty dang unkillable, even worse when you’re not prepared. 

They’ve got sawed offs and rock salt rounds in Stiles’ duffle though, and that’s something. The demons abandon their mostly drained prey, goblet and blood splashing to the floor, and come after Scott and Stiles instead. 

They end up back to back, the demons circling, teeth bared like wild animals. One rushes at Stiles, and he manages to get a shot off, making the demon gaps in startled pain. 

“That hurt, bitch,” she says, and throws her arm wide, power rippling in the air. It sends him sideways, into a table. 

The sickening thud of Stiles’ skull against the heavy metal top makes Scott’s blood run cold. He fumbles with his phone, both of them closing in on him, and manages to hit ‘play’ on the voice recording of Stiles reciting an exorcism right before one of them grabs him around the throat. 

“Stupid hunters,” the demon grinds out, her eyes inky, and Scott digs his nails into her hand, gasping for air that isn’t coming. He swings a knee up, putting his full weight behind it as he drives it into her stomach. 

The ground is hard against his back, Stiles’ recorded voice somewhere near his ear. He rolls over, coughing, his vision swimming. He finds the phone, clutches it to his chest as he throws himself out of the way of a booted foot aiming for his head.

Almost there. Almost there. Getting to the end of the recording. The demons have finally taken notice, snarling and snapping and coming for him, for the phone. He manages to duck between them, bringing one down by hooking an arm around her knee and pulling back until something pops, making her wail. 

And then, done. Last word said and gone. The phone falls silent, and Scott closes his eyes against the whirling black smoke that streaks through the air, looking for open bodies it won’t find. He and Stiles are both warded, inked the marks into their skin when they were 16. 

When he stands up there are three bodies on the floor. He goes straight for Stiles’ crumpled form. 

\---

John is their fixed point, the anchored parent with the four walls and stocked fridge and DVD collection. They go to him most times, between jobs, for holidays, when local law enforcement is riding just a bit too close to their heels.

Melissa isn’t fixed. She was, once, was brought up about as stationary as a hunter can be raised. Spent undergrad and nursing school all in the same city, at the same school, when she dipped her toes into a normal life, before she slipped back into something murkier, darker, because she had hunter’s blood, always would. 

They go to Melissa, though. They go when they’re hurting and broken and there’s blood in their mouths and on their hands and it’s _their_ blood. 

She’s still tracking the nest of vamps with the Argents, drifting west, towards them, and Scott prays to some unseen deity to keep Roscoe running as he floors it east down I-70. He pokes and prods Stiles and keeps him awake but he keeps slipping away, eyes unfocused and distant. It’s bad enough that if Melissa wasn’t just a couple of hours away he’d take Stiles to the hospital. 

She already has the door to her motel room open, and Scott barely remembers to turn the car off, practically hauling Stiles through the parking lot and into the room. 

Allison is there, although Chris is gone. She stands up sharply when she sees who it is, moves to help Scott maneuver Stiles onto a bed. 

“‘m ok,” Stiles slurs, trying to push Scott away with a weak grip. The way his arms fold loosely worries Scott. Stiles is normally all strong lines, controlled energy. 

“No you’re not, honey,” Melissa says, shining a penlight in Stiles’ eyes as he squirms. “He needs to go to the hospital.”

“I’ll take him,” Scott says, default, automatic. 

“Nope, too many questions,” Melissa says. “I’ll know exactly what to say so that they ask the least amount possible. Do you guys have any Walsh IDs on you?”

(A fake set that almost never gets used, a happy family, with drivers licenses, insurance, a mortgage, everything. The Walshes, wearing John and Melissa and Scott and Stiles’ faces.)

“Yeah,” Scott says, voice tight, and goes to dig in Roscoe’s glovebox with shaking fingers. 

Allison almost has to sit on him to keep him from vibrating out of his skin after Melissa drives off with Stiles. She pulls him down onto one of the beds and wraps him in her arms and tells him, voice low, about the vamps they’re tracking. 

He tries to concentrate on her voice, tries to remember what this used to feel like, long summers when they were just kids all hanging out behind the bar and stealing innocent kisses. It’s difficult though, mind straining for Stiles. 

(They were never children. Not really. They’ve had guns and bows and stakes and silver in their hands for too long. But, sometimes, Scott likes to pretend they were young once.)

\---

(They’d grown up together, Melissa and Claudia thick as thieves. Both came from hunting families, long bloodlines that ran back onto aged pages of family bibles. When Claudia had died -- of cancer, of all things, something so fragile and _human_ \-- Melissa had drifted a bit. Gone on the road. Scott had gone with her, all of 12, just starting to grow into his body. He’d wanted to stay with Stiles, but he couldn’t leave his mom. Wouldn’t dream of it.

(His dad was never an option. Having an FBI contact that knew their story, the real story, was handy, but he was a ‘screwed up son of a bitch’, in John’s words.)

He remembers sunrises and sunsets on the road, so many of them. Over the grand canyon, the Pacific, the mountains, wide open prairies and northern forests. He remembers salt and flame and packing it into rounds and watching it dance from a match. 

He’s good with his hands. Allison has her knives and bow and Stiles his guns, and Scott likes all of it, but he’s the best with his hands. He shadow boxed against trees, spared with some of the other kids they drifted past, got in fights when they stopped long enough for him to go to school. 

(He never started them, always waited for the bigger, meaner kid to put the first foot forward, bring their fists up first. Always made sure he was doing it for some other kid, cornered in the lunch room or under the bleachers.)

He went back to Stiles though, after a few years. Melissa had understood, kissed his forehead and told him to mind John. 

They fit back together so easily, too easily. Nothing had changed. They looked different, older, more hooded, Scott’s hair longer and Stiles’ shorter, but they were still Scott and Stiles. 

Too old to share a bed but they still did. It had been a long time since nightmares had scared them, but it was nice to have another body to cling to, a port in the storm. 

The first time Stiles had kissed him it had been to kiss him awake from a nightmare, away from the dark, mouth hot and heavy and lips parted. 

Scott had kissed back, not even thinking. They came together without a second thought, like this had been where they’d been meaning to get to all along, and they’d never even needed to talk about it. It was just something that Was.)

\---

They keep him overnight and into the next day, but Melissa brings him home on shaky feet at three in the afternoon the next day. Scott’s practically worn a groove into the carpet pacing, and he collapses into bed with Stiles, keeping their bodies close. Stiles slips a hand under Scott’s shirt, anchoring his palm over Scott’s tattoo on his side, and Stiles breathes out, his eyes closing. 

“We’ll be out of your hair soon,” Scott tells Melissa, and she bends down to run a hand through his curls, press a kiss to his temple. 

“Stay as long as you need, baby,” she says. 

Chris has been gone for 24 hours, so Melissa and Allison load up and head out, leaving the room with Scott and Stiles and the sound of their breathing and the scratchy sheets. 

“Dude, don’t do that again,” Scott says, talking into Stiles’ hair. 

“Not planning on it,” Stiles groans, shifting. “Hurt like hell.” 

Stiles yawns and burrows further against Scott, under his chin, fingers tangled in his shirt, and Scott starts to breathe normally for the first time since the mountains. 

\---

Stiles still looks kind of sluggish for a few days, and Melissa pays for the room through the end of the week, even though she and the Argents move on after they find Chris. Job’s not done, and they have to follow it. 

“Stay safe,” Allison says, scooping them both into a wide armed hug. “Next time I see you two, you better be in one piece.”

“When have we ever been in one piece?” Stiles says, grinning. There is bruising snaking down out of his hairline and across his forehead, eyebrow to ear. 

Allison laughs at that and finally lets them go, keeping her eyes on them as she swings into the back of Chris’ SUV. Melissa kisses them both, reminding Stiles of when they were short enough that she had to bend down to kiss the tops of their heads. 

“Seriously,” Melissa says. “If you need _anything_ , call. Even if you just have a headache.” 

“I’m good,” Stiles promises, but Melissa gives him a look.

“Go, mom,” Scott says, grinning. “You’ve got vampires to kill.”

“Don’t do anything that would get you grounded,” she says, smiling, and they laugh, because what even would that be? There have been drinks, and stab wounds, and bloody hands and broken pool cues and angry beasties and dead monsters for years now. 

“Love you!” Scott calls, and Melissa calls it back, and Chris peels out of the parking lot. 

“Your mom’s super awesome,” Stiles says, and Scott just smiles, because he knows. Always has, always will. 

\---

Considering they usually camp or curl up in the Jeep, having a whole motel room is a luxury. 

“We could watch porn,” Stiles says thoughtfully as he flips through channels. He’s carding a hand through Scott’s hair where he’s curled up with his head in Stiles’ lap. 

“What do they have?” Scott asks with a yawn, rolling over onto his back so that he can look up at Stiles. There’s a mole just under the edge of his jaw that Scott wants to press his lips to. 

“Umm,” Stiles draws out the word, presumably as he scrolls through channels. “A lot of the usual. All the really good stuff is online. This is like 90s basic shit.” 

“Your internet history scares me sometimes,” Scott says. 

“Yeah right, my internet history gives you _awesome_ ideas,” Stiles says. 

(There had been once, when John was gone overnight and the house was empty and nothing required their immediate attention, and they’d found nylon rope and a wide strip of leather.)

Scott grins at that, and he pushes himself up on his elbows, looking up at Stiles. Stiles tips his head to look down at him, one eyebrow raised, and then Scott moves. It’s fast, he’s always been a little bit faster than Stiles, and it’s easy to get him flipped and pinned. He’ll do this sometimes, pull Stiles’ hands up and tight in the small of his back, press his head down. 

Tonight though, heeding Melissa’s warning to watch Stiles for any signs of head trauma, he lets him have his head and hands, lets Stiles grind back up against him, looking at him with trickster eyes over his shoulder. 

“This might be strenuous activity,” Scott says. 

“It better fucking be,” Stiles says, and his hand is already going for his fly. 

\---

They mean to go back to John, but then they get wind of something that sounds distinctly spirit-like in butt-fuck-nowhere Illinois, so they keep going east, instead. 

The land is pancake flat, and the corn that’s spread out across the fields is mostly dead, parched under a drought sky. It stands brittle, waiting to be plowed under, a dry yellow color against the blue curve of the world above it. 

Some hunters can pull shit like pretending to be cops or even FBI agents, but Stiles and Scott are still too young, too wet behind the ears, and they know they’d never get away with it. So, instead, they break into the local morgue under a full moon. 

They shut out the heavy wind behind the solid, metal door, and stand for a moment in the cool darkness. There’s no movement, and almost no sound, just the soft hum of something electrical and the hiss of the wind outside. 

Turns out their info was wrong. The bodies are all clawed up and missing one exceptionally important bit of person: their hearts. The news hadn’t mentioned that part. 

“Freaking werewolves,” Stiles sighs into the gloom as Scott rolls the last of the bodies back into the cooler. 

“We should call Derek,” Scott says. “Figure out if there’s a pack near here.” 

Stiles pulls a face, but he still fishes his phone out of his pocket to leave Derek a message when they’re back out in the Jeep. 

\---

With nothing but rolling farm after rolling farm and no high ground to spend the night on, they decide to splurge on a locked door. The motel lobby is middle-of-the-night empty, only the half-awake guy behind the desk taking up any space. The whole place is grey and shabby, outside and inside, but neither of them particularly care. It’s a roof and a solid door. 

“I smell like dead person,” Stiles mutters as soon as the door is latched behind them. 

“Being in a morgue will do that to you,” Scott says, stripping out of his shirt and shimmying out of his jeans and tossing it all in the direction of where they’ve left the bags on the table in the corner. They’ll have to do laundry. All that pine-fresh mountain air smell, lost to motels and corpses from Kansas to Illinois. 

He shoots Melissa a quick text, and then John one from Stiles’ phone, before he slips into the steamy heat of the shower with Stiles, gets up behind him, nosing at his shoulder blades and scattering slippery kisses across the nape of his neck. 

“Mmm, easy,” Stiles rumbles, lets his head fall back onto Scott’s shoulder. 

“You don’t like easy,” Scott says, dragging his teeth across Stiles’ neck, digging his fingers into his hips. Stiles’ breathing stutters into a moan, and he bucks back against Scott, hot-wet skin on skin. 

“Hell no,” Stiles says, and turns around so that he can take them both in one of his wide, rough palms. Scott kisses him, lips sliding and teeth clacking, heavy and fierce. 

\---

There’s no pack, not for miles, as far as Derek can tell from the Hale records. All they’ve got is a loose-canon, half-feral human roaming the fields. 

They’re not sure exactly how they’re going to track it down until a report comes across the hand-held police scanner Stiles keeps in one of the cupholders. Two cows, missing their hearts. 

“Bingo,” Stiles says, throwing the Jeep into gear and heading down a bumpy, dusty road in the direction of the heartless cow farm. There’s a mailbox out front that says _Carver_ in peeling paint. 

A woman with sun in her skin and silver shot through her dark hair answers the door, narrowing her eyes at them. A mangy cat winds around her ankles, less pet and more mouser. 

“What can I do for you boys?” She asks. “You’re not Mormons, are you?”

“Nope,” Scott says, grinning. “We’re from the student paper at Wesleyan.” 

She considers them for a moment. 

“This is about the cows, isn’t it,” she says finally, sighing. When they nod she shuffles out the way to let them in, and sits them down at her kitchen table with glasses of honest to god, fresh squeezed lemonade. 

“That animal, whatever it is, keeps coming around,” she tells them. “Scared it off two nights in a row, but it got smart last night. Came when I was asleep. Swear the thing had enough brains to watch for when I switched the porch light off.” 

“Bingo,” Scott mouths to Stiles, and he grins back. 

\---

They camp out in the Jeep on an access road past the barn, where the spill of ambient porch light cuts across the dirt, but where they’re out of the line of sight of the back windows. Stiles dangles his left foot out the door frame and leans on the steering wheel, rubbing at the back of his neck. 

“Why Wesleyan?” Stiles asks, and Scott looks up at him from where he’s checking over the rifle in his hands. 

“I knew it was around here,” Scott says, shrugging. 

“Sure,” Stiles says, eyes still on the spill of light and chewing on a hangnail. Scott sighs. 

“Yes, I knew where it was because you applied.”

“Good anthropology department,” Stiles says. Scott knows. Stiles threw those words around a lot a few years ago, when they were both leafing through the thick college guide books, dreaming of where they might go. They both had at least graduated from high school, which, in their line of work, was somewhat of a miracle. They even had the grades to go. Somehow though, even when the acceptances came in, they never got around to saying _ok, let’s do this_ to any of them. 

“You should have gone,” Scott says. Stiles snorts, shaking his head. 

“Yeah, there was no way I was leaving you behind to go waste four years of my life in downstate Illinois.”

“We both could have gone. We both got accepted to schools in Boston.” 

Stiles finally looks at him, the light catching one side of his face. 

“We wouldn’t have been good at being college students,” Stiles says, low. 

“We would have been great,” Scott says, and the porch light clicks off. Stiles eyes are whip fast, right back to forward, into the darkness.

Something shifts inside the barn. They move without speaking, without telegraphing what they’re going to do, but they still move together, guns out and knives tucked into loose clothing. 

Stiles gets his shoulder clawed half to hell and Scott breaks three of five fingers on his left hand, but eventually Scott gets his arms around the wolf, spins him to face Stiles, and Stiles sinks a silver blade into his heart, twists for good measure. The were’s eyes stay open through it all, fading from yellow to a boring, average brown, the glow gone.

They might be have been great in college, but they’re the best at this. 

\---

“What’re we looking at?” Stiles asks the next morning when he climbs into the Jeep with two styrofoam cups of gas station coffee. 

“30 hours on I-80,” Scott says, folding up the map and shoving it in his jacket pocket before taking the cup Stiles offers him. 

“Good times,” Stiles says, turning the key and kicking the Jeep’s ass back to life. 

“You sure you’re ok to drive?” Scott asks.

“Totally fine,” Stiles says, slipping on a pair of Wayfarers and backing out of the parking lot. Scott doesn’t miss the way Stiles’ shoulder tenses every time he shifts, but Scott figures once they’re out on the highway, it won’t matter much. Melissa’s most of the way back to John’s, and if she’s still there in two days, he’ll get Stiles to sit still long enough for Melissa to check out his shoulder. It’s probably fine - Stiles has lost a whole hell of a lot more blood before - but it’ll be a new scar for his collection. 

Scott nods off at various points, and forces Stiles to let him drive around noon, after they’ve added a couple of McDonald’s bags to the detritus piling up in the Jeep. 

They stop outside of Cheyenne, having gone as far as they can, and find a campground that both of them feel like they can sign off on, can sleep in without getting too wigged. 

A tent’s not worth it, they never put one up, unless it’s raining. Stiles unrolls their bed rolls while Scott digs the sleeping bags out of the back and they lie head to head, staring straight up through a break in the trees. The almost-full moon means it’s not a perfect star sky, but they can still pick most things out. 

“How many times have I told you all those stories now?” Stiles asks, waving a hand up at the constellations. Orion is right above them, his belt bright. 

“About a billion times,” Scott laughs.

“Well, get ready to hear about them again,” Stiles says, and Scott smiles, and doesn’t stop him from spinning tales about Corvus and Aquila and Cepheus. 

\---

The lights are still on at the Sheriff’s when they pull up the drive, even though it’s edging on midnight. Melissa’s old Bronco is parked off onto the dirt shoulder on one side and Stiles pulls up behind it. 

“Hey, boys,” John says when they crash through the door, same as always, dusty and tired and maybe a little bit sharper than when they left. 

“Hola, daddio,” Stiles says, stops only long enough to throw his duffle in the direction of the laundry room (it only makes it to the middle of the kitchen, under the table). 

“You guys brought laundry home, didn’t you?” Melissa asks, giving them a pointed look. 

“Hey, it’s not that bad this time,” Stiles protests. 

“It’s really not,” Scott says. “No guts or anything. Just, you know. Blood.”

“For something new and different,” John sighs, and Stiles grins. 

They tromp upstairs, easily slip through their usual _finally home_ routine, clothes on the floor, warm shower, soft bed. 

There’s a bit of squirming and shoving, but eventually Scott lets Stiles win the big spoon spot, and doesn’t mind it much, Stiles radiating warmth and curved around him. 

“Tomorrow, mom’s looking at your shoulder,” Scott says, his eyes already slipping shut. 

“Yeah, dude,” Stiles yawns, “tomorrow.” 

Scott reaches back to lace their fingers together where Stiles has a hand resting over his tattoo, and Stiles squeezes his hand, an automatic response. 

“Right here,” Stiles murmurs into Scott’s shoulder, a promise and a prayer, and Scott smiles in the dark.


End file.
